It’s inevitable that employees will leave your organisation, but it’s not always easy to figure out why – especially when it happens unexpectedly. Two of the most common ways that HR departments dig into a departing employee’s motivation (or lack thereof) are the exit interview and exit survey. These can provide valuable information on the underlying issues that contributed to someone’s departure from the company.

There’s a lot of good advice online about what you can do to increase the chances of uncovering useful information. Second- and third-line managers are more likely to receive honest feedback, for example. However, despite the fact that exit surveys and interviews are widely used, many managers and HR professionals recognise the flaws that limit their validity and effectiveness.

Why your exit interviews may not be effective

1. Most employees have already checked out

Many people leaving an organisation view exit interviews as a formality. Handing in your resignation is the hard part, which means most employees have very little motivation to dig into their reasons for leaving and explain them in a way that could benefit the business.

Even if an employee is leaving because they’re unhappy, it’s unlikely they’re going to say anything negative. Most employees want to avoid burning bridges, which means they’re more concerned with keeping the peace than telling the truth in an exit interview.

2. Some employees want to see the world burn

On the flip side, a minority of people will go into an exit interview with a score to settle. It can be difficult to know what feedback to trust when it’s emotionally charged. This is especially true when the interviewer (often from HR) has little context to understand what is authentic, and the criticism is rarely constructive.

3. Interviewers don’t always want to hear the truth

When someone leaves unexpectedly, it can reflect badly on management, especially if the person leaving is one of your top performers. Even though most exit interviews come with a structured set of questions, some managers will try and direct conversation away from sensitive areas in order to avoid recording any negative feedback.

4. Recent events impact our perception

As humans we tend to judge our experiences based on how they feel at their most intense, and when they’re coming to a close – which is referred to as the peak-end rule. How people respond in an exit interview can vary dramatically based on their final weeks at a company, and it might not be a reflection of their time as a whole.

5. A lack of action after the interview

An HBR survey found that fewer than a third of executives could name a specific action that was taken as the result of an exit interview. Even if you’re lucky enough to avoid the pitfalls mentioned above, the feedback you collect can end up going nowhere. This is often down to a lack of transparency or accountability; often the findings from an exit interview just get filed away.

Why regular feedback is better for addressing retention issues

The main drawback of exit interviews and surveys is that you are only using a single point of reference to draw conclusions about a person’s experience and the lead-up to their departure. Not only is a one-off event much less reliable than having multiple data-points, but it also makes it much easier to forget to follow up on.

More and more companies these days are collecting regular employee feedback in place of singular events like the annual engagement survey, the six-month performance review, or the exit interview. When you gather feedback regularly, you end up with a far richer and more valuable dataset that has three clear advantages when it comes to employee retention:

1. You can address issues as they arise and prevent regrettable churn

If you’re collecting regular feedback from your employees, it gives you a chance to spot any negative issues in your business or culture that might lead people to leave ahead of time. This means you have the chance to rectify problem areas – or at the very least communicate to your team that you are aware of them – instead of trying to uncover what went wrong after it’s too late.

2. You have historic data to identify common themes among departing employees

You won’t be able to prevent every departure, but if you’ve been gathering regular feedback, you will have several months of historic data from those employees that have left. You can use this much larger dataset to uncover the common themes among departures, and reliably identify the primary underlying reasons that lead to attrition.

This extra insight into how your employees were feeling during their final months will give you a lot more to go on than the one-time information gathered in the exit interview.

3. You can track whether the initiatives you set up to address attrition are effective

Not only does this data give you a better way of investigating issues, it also allows you to measure the impact of any changes you make. Collecting feedback from your employees regularly allows you to see if factors that were previously significant issues are no longer impacting your team now that changes have been put in place.

How Peakon helps you improve employee retention

For our customers, the historic data needed to understand the reasons behind attrition already exist in the platform. With our recent Separation Insights update, we’ve made it easier to extract that information and gain valuable insight.

Separation Insights is a new way to segment data and investigate the final months of feedback from recent leavers. Because this feedback is collected from the same engagement surveys that employees already answer, there is no additional time or effort needed to acquire it.

The Separation Phase segment automatically highlights priority areas, suggests appropriate actions, and allows you to look deeper into anonymous employee comments. This makes it easy to identify the factors that are causing attrition, and implement the right fixes.

Separation Insights and subsequent manager action plans can also be made visible to stakeholders across the business, promoting accountability and ensuring that steps are taken.

To learn how Separation Insights works in more detail, watch the webinar below, read our help centre article, or book a demo with a member of our team.

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Författare

Petros Vaxevanakis

Petros likes waves and snowflakes. He hates advertising but loves productizing. Juggling between product and marketing, Copenhagen and London he celebrates the products changing the employees' experience. He is always up for a smile and a high5.